RoboTastic

I just got my Wacom Bamboo drawing tablet in the mail. I LOVE IT! It is like being a kid again. It is so much fun drawing with it. I am not any good, but whatever. Literally, endless entertainment. I only have a 15″ monitor and it is the perfect size. I can’t imagine using a larger tablet. My only compliant is that it can make jaggy lines if you are not zoom in 100%.

I was flying out of Dallas Fortworth when I saw a weird plane with 3-enginges. There weren’t too many 3 engine planes made, the Lockheed TriStar, the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 & 11 and the Boeing 727. Not many of these plane are in service anymore. The plane I saw was a TriStar and there are only 4 of them being operated in the US. They are owned by ATA and used to shuttle troops. Wikipedia has an interesting entry on them. Apparently, its failure in the marketplace led Lockheed to leave the commerical aviation sector. I managed to get a picture of the plane as it was taking off.

I just got Windows Live Writer. I am loving the built-in spell checker! Grab a copy here: http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/

I find myself spending a rather large amount of my time in the metro. I guess it I’d better than being stuck in a car.

I rode in one of the cars they are testing the different seating layouts in.

I have been having a problem with Picasa not finding new files. It should be seeing the files and adding them, the directories they are in are marked in the Folder Manager as Always Watch. However for some reason Picasa was not picking them up…

Luckily I figured out the reason it was not finding them! When Picasa went from version 2.0 to 2.5 it add a change to Folder Manager. Folder Manager no longer looks at files inside any folders named “Originals” and I had been saving all my files in a date based file tree with all of the original files stored in folders all “Originals”.

So that seems to be the problem. Now I need an easy way to rename about 1000 folders!!

So work on my Pocket Post has been slowly progressing, right now I am just hunting down annoying bugs. Most of them I didn’t created, and I am stuck Googling for them. To help others out, I thought I would describe the problem and give the solution.

• Problem: I keep getting the error: “Could not establish trust relationship with remote server” when trying to connect to a server using SSL. The server in question was the Blogger server.Solution: I tried just typing in the address “https://www.blogger.com/atom” into the browser and it turns out that blogger’s certificate is bad. Since you are accessing blogger programatically, the warning never pops up and instead the request fails. The workaround is to add your own certificate processing routine that will accept any certificate, even if it is not valid. I found a great bit of code here that does just that: CODE. Problem solved!
• Problem: After adding this code, I kept getting a weird build error from Visual Studio saying it was having trouble finding a resource: “The “GenerateResource” task failed unexpectedly. System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0×8000000A): The data necessary to complete this operation is not yet available.” Solution: Turns out I wasn’t the only one having this problem. Unfortunately no one, not even Microsoft had an idea of what exactly was causing it, luckily they had a solution that involves changing the Project file. Unfortunately there solution has a small bug, it should be: true They are missing a “/”. Anyhow this seemed it fix it for me.
• Problem: The Atom API for blogger seems to be giving errors for some posts and not other.
  Solution: Turns out the problem was that I was sending non-escaped charecters: !, &, <, > without properly packaging them. To fix this I placed the Title string and the Post Content string in CDATA tags. Now it looks like this: "" and things work much better!

We are both in Boston now, T – 3 days and counting!

Here is a random story…

So way back in April on a trip out to San Diego, both me and Dereck had a Red-eye flight back. The flight left at around 11pm or so and we got to the airport around 6 or so because there wasn’t much to do. Anyhow we were waiting around a long time for the flight… when they asked for volunteers. Both Dereck and I got a chance, Dereck took it and I ended up heading home because I was pooped and had already spent so long in the airport. Dereck got a free round trip ticket, a nice hotel and a first class ticket home. I got almost no sleep and was out of it for the whole Saturday… and wished I had taken it.

Fast forward to my trip to Denver. I had a 6:40pm flight back home which got me in at exactly 11:58pm. When I got to the airport I found out my flight was delayed til 8pm. Which would have gotten me in around 1:30am and home closer til 2:30am… ick!

Luckily they oversold the flight, and asked for volunteers… the problem is that said they didn’t have any hotel rooms and you would have to sleep in the airport. Since I wouldnn’t be getting a good night of sleep anyhow, I decided to sign up. I wanted around for a while but eventaully the end up being able to get everyone on the plane and told me I should board. I go to take my seat, get comfortable and give Carolyn a call. After a little the gate agent comes on and motions me. Turns out there were a bunch of passengers sitting around the gate hadn’t checked in even though they had been announcing the flight and that you would lose your seat if you didn’t check in.

I was ready to sleep over in the airport, especially because the flight they booked me on was a first class seat on a 777… whooo-ie! The 777 has the crazy first class suites that have lie flat seats. Anyhow the gate agent couldn’t figure out how to do the VDB so they brought me to the back room of the Customer Service Center ( in front of a line of 100 people). I lucked out the Suprevisor got me a free round-trip ticket for the lower 48, a couple of meal vouchers and… a Hotel room! Along with that first class ticket. I will lose about half of Saturday, but I will get a good nites sleep. Not too bad! Moral of the story, is be flexible and roll with the punches. yep!